Forcing people who work for you to give you and others presents is unethical. Appeal to your colleague's better instincts as an educator and discourage this practice immediately. As you are a colleague and not a subordinate, you are in a position to be able to appeal to this person's sense of equity.
With Valentine's Day right around the corner, many successful real estate agents across the country will be doing what they do every February: dropping off chocolates, flowers, handwritten cards, and in a few ambitious cases, cherry pies, on their clients' doorsteps. And weirdly it works. Not because chocolate makes people sell their house. Not because cherry pie unlocks listing inventory. But because Valentine's Day taps
Walk through an airport bookstore, scroll the podcast charts, or listen to a leadership keynote, and you'll likely find lessons on boundaries and burnout. Celebrities talk about therapy with a casualness that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Coaches tell C-suite executives to " lead with vulnerability." And bestselling books like The Gifts of Imperfection, You Should Talk to Someone, and The Body Keeps the Score have given the world a common vocabulary for talking about anxiety, shame, and trauma.
Confucius, China's most famous philosopher, was asked by a student if there was one word that could represent a guiding principle in life. His answer was "shu" - meaning a reciprocal arrangement exists between yourself and others, so consider their needs when you do something. It's a good rule of thumb for any individual, but governments should particularly bear it in mind, because a mutual connection exists between a government and its electorate that any administration ignores at its peril.
Most people work to live, not live to work. But considering the amount of time most people spend in the workplace, over time, many employees come to value morale over money. Not surprisingly, job satisfaction is often directly tied to workplace culture: Employees survive and thrive when they feel supported, leave when they feel devalued. A main complaint from employees who have traded salary for satisfaction is not overt discrimination or harassment; it is incivility.
Reciprocity (give-and-take exchange) is essential for successful human interactions. Feeling motivated to return a favor (and feeling owed for a favor) drives social behavior, personal interaction, and interpersonal attraction too. In fact, as I discuss in Attraction Psychology (Nicholson, 2022), reciprocal social exchange is the heart of dating and romantic relationships. Beyond that, it is a motivational force in professional interactions as well.
"I have a rule: I never accept an invitation if I don't want to invite somebody back," Garten told Esquire. According to Garten, you should never invite anyone because you feel obliged, and she is right! Fewer things are more uncomfortable than extending an invitation to someone whose company you don't enjoy, and on the flip side, no one wants to go to a dinner party if the invitation wasn't genuine.
